DEAN: AN ECHO, NOT A CHOICE?

From
Dean's major
foreign policy address on Monday:"I have supported U.S.
military action to roll back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, to halt
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, [and] to stop Milosevic's campaign of
terror in Kosovo...."

Now, I guess that's not surprising. But Dean's argument against the
Iraq war has focused on the idea (I'd say, the fact) that Iraq was
never a national security threat. Well, it wasn't a national
security threat in 1991 either, and Clinton's half-hearted argument
that we had national security interests in Serbia amounted to"well,
World War One started over there somehow when somebody killed some
archduke or something." And if ethnic cleansing and terror argued
for war over Kosovo, it's pretty hard to see why they didn't in the
case of Hussein, who made Milosevic look like Niles Crain.

There's nothing in the rest of the speech that provides any kind of
bold new foreign policy vision either. Spend more on foreign aid.
Do more to wipe out AIDS in Africa. Work with our allies and don't
tick them off gratuitously. Snore.

I'm rooting for Dean because he seems angry about something, and I'd
like to see a fight, rather than a Clinton-Dole 1996-style lovefest
in 2004. But the idea that he'd be a marked improvement over Bush is
tough to credit. As somebody put it once, government's a massive
runaway freight train careening towards disaster. Every four years
we have a big to-do over who gets to sit up in the front car and
pretend they're driving. It's hard to get excited about that.